Guedes wants to recycle economic promises to attract support for Bolsonaro in 2022

Minister Paulo Guedes (Economy) advocates that President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) support the liberal agenda during the 2022 electoral campaign. presidential race.

Guedes’ vision meets with resistance behind the scenes. Government interlocutors say the minister has been a counterpoint to people around Bolsonaro who have been trying to convince the president to drop the reform speech out of fear that such measures will be unpopular and cause him to lose votes.

Guedes, however, argues that votes and support from key sectors will be lost precisely if his agenda is dropped. Therefore, it has proposed to continue the search for measures promised in the 2018 campaign, such as administrative and tax reforms, privatizations and the reduction in the size of the State – a package that has not been fully implemented to date.

“The president won the election in a center-right alliance. It’s the right-wing conservatives in mores, and the center-liberals in the economy. We have to move forward with our program, at the risk of losing the center’s support,” he said in last Wednesday (1st) at an event at the Ministry of Economy.

“If we don’t privatize, we don’t sell, people will think ‘who are we going to vote for, [se for] to keep everything still, the way it was, state-owned, everything the same as it always was?'” he said. “We have to rotate, we have to follow our agenda,” he said.

Pre-candidates for the Presidency have sought to define representatives in the economic area. Former minister Sergio Moro chose economist Affonso Celso Pastore; and governor João Doria, economist Henrique Meirelles. Bolsonaro, however, has yet to announce that Guedes will lead his economic proposals for 2022.

Guedes’ allies have affirmed that the minister can continue alongside Bolsonaro in the campaign, but they point out that the difficulties accumulated during the government now demand a guarantee of support from the president for the liberal program.

Guedes has recognized on different occasions that he has not been able to complete his goals. The government has not privatized entire companies – although it has advanced in the sale of subsidiaries, as in the case of Petrobras (which sold several assets, such as refineries and BR Distribuidora).

“I’m very frustrated that we’ve been here for two years and we haven’t been able to sell any state-owned company. It’s very frustrating,” he said in November 2020.

Guedes spoke again in frustration in recent days and cited the desire for a faster pace in implementing the measures. “It frustrates us to arrive with big dreams and make 50%, 40%,” he said on Tuesday (30).

Even so, Guedes has already spoken publicly about the electoral campaign. In recent days, the minister proposed the creation, in a new government, of the Ministry of Patrimony of the Union — which would be responsible for managing and selling federal assets and transferring the resources to a fund that would fight poverty.

Ideas are not new. Bolsonaro’s campaign program in 2018 proposed, for example, that “some state-owned companies will be extinguished, others will be privatized and, in their minority, due to their strategic nature, will be preserved”.

Before the idea of ​​the new Ministry of the Union’s Patrimony, Guedes was already speaking in an agency dedicated to privatizations. In 2019, it created the Special Secretariat for Privatization, Divestment and Markets —led by businessman Salim Mattar, founder and shareholder of the car rental company Localiza.

Mattar left the government complaining precisely about the lack of progress in privatizations due to a lack of political will — including Bolsonaro, in cases where sales needed only the Executive’s approval. “It just depends on him. There is a lack of will,” Mattar said in September 2020, shortly after his departure.

Guedes’ statements for 2022 so far point to a repackaging of the promises of the last election — a package that contains the challenge of convincing the electorate that, this time, they would be fulfilled.